NOAA Climate Service
I haven’t really kept up with the news in the last several days, as I have been fighting off a sinus infection or the flu, not sure which. Thus, I completely missed the news yesterday that the Obama administration is in the process of creating a completely new government agency that will be charged with studying and reporting on climate change, under the umbrella of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NOAA CLIMATE SERVICE
Officially proposed by the Commerce Department, the new agency will be called the NOAA Climate Service and it will bring all of NOAA’s climate science and services together under one roof. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it will have six regional directors around the country. From NOAA’s webiste:
Individuals and decision-makers across widely diverse sectors – from agriculture to energy to transportation – increasingly are asking NOAA for information about climate change in order to make the best choices for their families, communities and businesses. To meet the rising tide of these requests, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today announced the intent to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency’s strong climate science and service delivery capabilities.
“NOAA’s reorganization to consolidate its formidable capabilities relating to climate science and services in a single office is an important step forward in the larger effort of harnessing relevant capabilities across all the executive branch agencies to help citizens and businesses plan for and cope with climate change,” said Shere Abbott, associate director for environment and energy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
As I have written several articles last year, concerning climate change and global warming, it should be well known by all of my readers that I am a skeptic of man-made climate change. That does not mean I am against taking care of our environment and I certainly have nothing against studying the climate and learning what we can from weather patterns and other natural occurrences. I think it is behooves us to learn as much about our planet as we can and I think I am safe in saying the NOAA has provided us with a wealth of information on these subjects. This is especially true with the weather. I have the NOAA weather page for our area bookmarked for a reason. Having said that, I do not want to see this new agency used as a tool by global warming activists to push their agenda on us.
From what I can understand about how this is will work, the new agency will combine NOAA’s climate science and it’s services under one agency. It will not be completed until the end of the year, as it requires congressional committee approval (I wonder why not the entire Congress) and we all know how long that can take. As has been the case with a lot of the initiatives put forth by the Obama administration concerning the climate, Jane Lubchenco, the head of the NOAA claims the new agency will create new jobs. From The Huffington Post:
In recent years, a widespread private weather forecasting industry has grown up around the National Weather Service, and Lubchenco said she anticipates growth of private climate-related business around the new agency.
So, will there be a boom in new climate-related business, just because the existing climate study and services from the NOAA are all being consolidated under a new agency within the agency? It’s too early to answer that question, but I do have a question of my own. How much is this consolidation going to cost the American taxpayer?
This is crazy… We the tax payers are going to fund more studies of a fraud and hoax in an effort to find some tidbit of evidence that will prove the theory of man-made global warming. Then, this effort will lead to the regulation of CO2- The gas we all exhale and is beneficial to plants…
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Larry, you ask’d …..”How much will the NOAA Climate Service cost the American taxpayer?”
To answer that question in this forum, one has to see and understand the “Political Realities” involved. Namely, that it can be alright to expand government agencies hugely, as was done in the creation of The Department of Homeland Security. We created an agency that had an underlying agenda. So, if a new administration proposes changes in government agencies, perhaps it is with a guilty conscience that some worry of pushing agenda’s upon unwilling segments of our society.
The short answer to Larry’s question is:
-A hellava lot cheaper than the department of HOmeland Security.
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David,
For the record, I have never been convinced that the Department of Homeland Security was a good idea. What we needed was better cooperation between the agencies already in place, not a new one. That being said, this article is not about that. I simply questioned if it was a good idea or not and how much it may cost us.
Larry, that’s good to hear (“I have never been convinced that the Department of Homeland Security was a good idea.”)
-you’re not a cookie cutter conservative!
You seem to be concerned about the costs that maybe incurred by NOAA’s re-consolidation. As i understand it, it is an attempt to further their climatological forecasting, which is timely since even now the Pentagon recognizes the reality of change that climate alterations can bring. Yeah, i am sure to hear that the good generals were forced to think this way by Obama, but the Pentagon has been studying this for years now…..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
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I hope that you are feeling better. Like you I am a skeptic, it seems that the last thing that we need right now is to be spending money on an issue that has so much scandal surrounding it right now. Climategate needs to be examined before we do anything like this.
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Larry, it seems that every change in a government department or entity always brings with it a greater cost. When have we seen the federal government trim waste? Only where tax cuts are put in place.
To answer your question, the NOAA climate service will cost more than what the government says it will. Every government program comes in at above projected cost.
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It’s not clear to me that this will cost anything at all. I’ve only read a couple of stories but they describe this as a restructuring of existing personnel and resources under a single umbrella to collect and distribute climate information mor effectively and efficiently. Lubchenco said the reason she needed approvals was because it means a reallocation of resources within the Commerce Dept but there was no indication that there would be a new funding request.
It might cost a lot more than it appears at first glance. My concern is that this will become a local version of the IPCC. If this agency is created – and as Larry noted, all the pieces are already in place – it will be positioned to work in tandem with NASA and the EPA to help promote things like cap & trade and CO2 regulation. This administration has spent a huge amount of money and at some point they need new revenue sources. The President would like to avoid breaking his promise of not raising taxes on the middle class; thus, industry and corporations will be penalized, instead of us. (wink, wink)
The head of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, has stated, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.”, and NOAA’s new website, http://www.climate.gov/, leaves little doubt as to where they stand on this issue. Both NASA and NOAA have been recently accused of manipulating climate data; at the very least cherry picking the data seems evident. Can we really trust these people when their entire budgets come from the bureaucrats who benefit from their research results?
I’ll leave you with a couple questions. Should the government have any role in scientific research? If so, should funding be appropriated to private enterprise only? How can peer review or something equivalent be incorporated into NASA and NOAA (etc) research?
If you recall the kinds of numbers they were talking about in Copenhagen, you have to ask if this is the biggest fraud/hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. Not just the U.S., but the entire world. Even Phil Jones will now tell you that there is no way to verify the ‘data’ anymore. He lost it all…
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